Month: February 2019

Enlarge / The first test firing of a flight version of SpaceX's Raptor rocket engine. (credit: Elon Musk/Twitter)

Elon Musk has been at SpaceX's test site for its rocket engines in central Texas this weekend. The facility near McGregor is where the company both tests Merlin engines for Falcon 9 flights, and also performs some experimental firings.

Due to a variety of reasons including financial pressures, SpaceX is pushing hard on the development of its next-generation Super Heavy rocket and Starship spacecraft. This was evidenced this weekend when, at 1:15am Central Time on Sunday morning, Musk shared a nighttime picture of himself on the test stand at McGregor, saying "with engineering team getting ready to fire new Raptor rocket engine." It was the dead of night on Super Bowl weekend, and they were working on an engine that won't go into space for a few years. But that didn't matter.

The test itself appears to have taken place later on Sunday. Eyewitness reports in Central Texas noted a large pop on Sunday evening, and more later Sunday night. Musk himself tweeted a photo shortly before 10pm local time, and thereafter a video. The test firing itself lasts for a few seconds, and was evidently successful. "First firing of Starship Raptor flight engine! So proud of great work by @SpaceX team!!" Musk wrote.

In Iron Man 2, there is a moment when Tony Stark is watching a decades-old film of his deceased father, who tells him “I'm limited by the technology of my time, but one day you'll figure this out. And when you do, you will change the world.” It’s a work of fiction but the notion expressed is legitimate. The visions and ideas of technologists are frequently well ahead of the technology of their times. Star Trek may have always had it, but it took the rest of us decades to get tablets and e-readers right.

The concept of liquid cooling sits squarely in this category as well. While the idea has been around since the 1960s, it remained a fringe concept when compared to the much cheaper and safer air cooling method. It took another 40 odd years before liquid cooling even started to take off in the 2000s, and then it was mostly confined to PC hobbyists who wanted to overclock their CPUs well beyond the recommended limits set by Intel and AMD.

Today, however, liquid cooling seems to be having a moment. You can buy a liquid cooling system for your PC for under $100, and a whole cottage industry of enterprise and data center vendors (like CoolIT, Asetek, Green Revolution Computing, Ebullient, just to name four) are all promoting liquid cooling of data center equipment. Liquid cooling continues to be primarily used in areas of supercomputing, high performance computing (HPC), or other situations involving massive amounts of compute power where CPUs run at almost 100 percent utilization, but such a use case is becoming mainstream.

We got fresh trailers for Avengers: End Game, Captain Marvel, and a hilarious Game of Thrones hijacking of a Bud Light ad during the Super Bowl this year, among other goodies. But by far the trippiest trailer was the teaser for Jordan Peele's forthcoming reboot of The Twilight Zone for CBS All Access.

Viewers thought they were returning to the game. But then the screen flickered into static, followed by an ominous message against a black screen: "CBS is off the air." You could almost hear the frustrated screams of millions of football fans echoing across the nation. Naturally, it was a fake-out: it was really the new trailer for The Twilight Zone.

The image returns, and we see an empty stadium with a lone figure walking slowly across the field. Doppelgängers of the same man are dotted about the otherwise empty seats as a voiceover talks about being "a man both nowhere and everywhere at the same time." Then we cut to a close-up, and surprise! It's Jordan Peele! "When truth is not the truth, what dimension are you even in?" he intones. Then a white door mysteriously appears on the field, and Peele opens it and walks through, disappearing into another dimension—presumably the Twilight Zone. Cue the familiar spooky musical theme. It didn't tell us much about the new series, but it was certainly an effective teaser.

Enlarge / Wi-Fi connects the world together, but it's still quite complicated. (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Energy harvesting is all the rage at the moment. I'd like devices that convert waste energy into electricity. If I could, I would fill my house with all sorts of high-tech Rube Goldberg-esque machines for getting an extra few watts back. But Wi-Fi energy harvesting has never impressed me as a potential source of wattage, even though the latest research shows that it might well be getting somewhere.

Most houses and public spaces abound with Wi-Fi signals, but harvesting the energy in those signals is difficult. The first challenge is to collect the radiation.

Advanced bunny-ear dynamics

Collecting the radiation requires some near-impossible antennas. The antennas must be omni-directional, meaning they absorb radiation from all directions equally well. The antennas should also absorb all the radiation that hits them, which ain't an easy task either.